


Pastiche

by Aris



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, M/M, Soulmates, hello darkness my old friend
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:32:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5158814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red is - blood. Sunsets. Flowers. Love. Red is the colour of the eyes of some insects, the tainting to rocks, sands, the culmination of crushed flower petals smeared onto warm skin. </p><p>Soulmate AU where you only see colour once you've met your soulmate</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pastiche

**Author's Note:**

> A quick note that I am not blind, nor am I close to anyone who is. My only experience is that learned via trawling through the internet and guides on how to not be That Asshole who tries to write marginalized characters off stereotypes.
> 
> And if anyone is interested, Necrosis is still being written, update should be happening in the next few months.

Before the accident - a term he only uses for other peoples convenience, because it’s considered both improper and self congratulating to tell people his loss of sight can be said to be due to his own heroics (see: basic human decency) - he had only ever seen in the standard black and white. A boring constant that he only knew was boring because those who saw otherwise would cry and laugh and drink to the sheen of colour they perceived in the light of their love.

In retrospect, as he has much time to reflect upon on the past, Matt had enjoyed his sight, as black and white and so horribly dull as people claimed it to be. It has been convenient to see, even if it wasn’t the whole spectrum others were allowed, and now it was less convenient. He doesn’t think about it, not in the ways he used to before Stick - because it’s not coming back. He doesn’t get that back. He has traded in for something else, something more, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like he got a good deal.

But that’s only sometimes. Time slips through his fingers too quickly to consider the brief moments. It is too easy to perceive life as a lack of. Define himself by what he is not, what he can’t do and what help he needs; other people are quick to do that, to file him away, and hell - they can throw his pity party without him.

He’s made his deal, and for better and for worse; it’s life.

  
  


Rain in Hells Kitchen has always been a novel experience. The pressure weighs down heavily on his mind long before it begins, the atmosphere shifting unsteadily above him, around him, trailing over his skin and raising his hairs to the sky. Before every shower there is a deep foreshadowing that reaches out to something buried and wormed far inside - it’s a thrill of the strangest fear, one he struggles to align with the worries rain brings; missed appointments, wet clothes, ruined hairstyles and biting cold at every appendage. It’s more than the aroma of corner shop chippies struggling through the pervading dampness, more than the muffled buzz of electric lights and the light pad of chilly paws against broken pavement. 

Innate adrenaline release, instinctual excitement. Fear, or something akin to it, can only be the outcome of these. It is the element that itches for him to punish.

Relief filters through with rain water, light and refrained or dark and dense. It’s purity, an aqua salvation that sweeps the streets clean, which reaches into crevices and caves and flushes the grime to the surface, that steals it away and brushes it against eroding stone in a hurried caress that can be felt again and again with every passing brush of ungloved fingers. A mockery of natures embrace on mans fingerprints. Something brief, and gone in the next instant – that is rain.

Matt remembers the rain as it always was in this part of the city - illuminated in greys, light and dark and the shade that stains his dads face after every fight, that grazes his knuckles for days after. Calling signs for liquor stores and strip clubs, smoked bars and familiar boxing joints. His memory of this is pervaded with this filtering reaches of light he couldn’t comprehend, and now he longs to place it.

He used to hope, now he dreads – fire eats at his sight. He’s heard it’s the colour of hell.

  
  


When he first met Foggy, few things stood out to him. 

He wasn’t dying, which Matt appreciated. It was always stressful, in a selfish perspective, to meet someone you could smell the death on - not literally, but, sometimes someone smells like less iron than they should, or of the bitter chemical markers of radiation, pills, blood from that mornings injections. Sometimes he hears a whisper in a heartbeat, the grinding of bone, the flutter of arteries as blood struggles to weep through. They speak death to him. Terminal hospital beds waiting to happen.

Healthiness isn’t shocking in university students, though, and Foggy was nothing special in that regard. Utterly ordinary. The room had been a shade too hot, and Foggy had reacted a shade even further when he introduced himself. Two heart beats where there should have been one; interest. He calls Matt handsome. There’s no lie in his body, but the truth has always been subjective. 

And then, Foggy is horribly wonderful, and it’s an utter travesty there isn’t a thing in the universe that could have indicated this about him until he opened his mouth. He’s delightful and warm and suddenly the cinnamon undertones clinging to his skin and old clothes is welcoming, suddenly store-bought deodorant, fake cheese from the burger place in the student union building and smoky yarn are the best fucking things in the universe, because in that moment they accumulate into this impression of Foggy, and Matt couldn’t dream of anything better.

He holds his cane tightly in his palm, the ball of it smooth and faultless, and he swears he can feel the air shift with the force of Foggy’s smile.

Nothing outstanding at all. 

  
  


The breaking of a bone is so much more than a simple crack, a clean slice in collagen and calcium. 

Matt can feel his bones flex as they push against his skin, can feel the mans organs splinter open against his own, skin pulling apart and shock reverberating back into his eye sockets. Bone shakes, stands true then snaps, fractures, minuscule shards tearing away at the flesh surrounding, perforating veins and cutting harshly into muscle, cartilage. Blood rushes into empty spaces, presses down on sinus caverns and blooms to the open air, rushes to line the sagging flesh under eyes closed in pain. He can feel the screwed up skin, the tensed muscle.

Fresh blood. Oxygenated. 

He can almost taste it.

Its an age later when gasps of pain, vibrations of agony, reach his eardrums. The man, mid forties and on what smells like some kind of beta blocker, probably for his hypertension (heavy, hard, fast), is curled into the floor like a sick imitation of a wounded child could possibly end the vengeance that comes his way.

The young girls skin is still embedded in his nails. 

Matt steps forward, boot raising, and a cat the street over yowls after its missing owner.

He goes home that night, and Foggy asks him why his knuckles are so red. He says, “I don’t know, Foggy”, because he’s tired and can feel the sluggish flex of every fiber of every muscle pulling his body through the cramped room. He collapses on the bed, bag containing blood stained clothes falling next to him, and feels his eyelashes flutter against his eye line. 

Two days later, fingertips feeling at the slight raise of a braille text book, he realises Foggy didn’t just see discoloring, didn’t just see a darker grey stain his knuckles.

He saw red.


End file.
